Month: February 2016
Elizabeth S. Eisenstein has passed away
She wrote the classic book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, still worth reading. Here is the NYT obituary. The Washington Post obituary introduced me to another side of her life:
A year after retiring, Dr. Eisenstein achieved a different sort of professional peak, earning her first No. 1 ranking in tennis — as a member of the U.S. Tennis Association’s 65-and-over division.
Betty Eisenstein, as she was known on the court, played her first adult tournament in 1973, the year she turned 50. She lost — to International Tennis Hall of Fame member Dorothy “Dodo” Cheney — but quickly found her footing in a sport that she had played only briefly as a girl.
Dr. Eisenstein landed on the cover of Washington City Paper in 2005, under the headline “The Assassin.” Though 82 and standing only 5-foot-2, she was said to move “like a kid”: “She makes her opponent work so hard and hit so many extra shots that all the body blows eventually catch up to her,” the writer, Huan Hsu, said of her lethal drop shot.
Friday assorted links
1. Timothy Taylor on the World Bank.
2. Assortative mating across disorders.
3. A model in which only preferences for prestige survive evolution.
4. Mortgages to buy pharmaceuticals? Paper is here.
5. Geographic average is over (NYT); “It’s almost like you are looking at two different countries…”
Arrived in my pile
Timothy P. Hubbard and Harry J. Paarsch, Auctions, from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series.
Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism.
Based on a short pawing of both volumes, I saw only virtues and no flaws.
The (refugee) problem with the Coase theorem
The EU’s agreed a €3bn deal with Turkey in order to help keep more migrants in the country, and reduce the influx of migrants. There’s been a lot of squabbling over how much each EU member state would pay, and the commitments have finally been agreed. The cash has not yet been delivered with concrete details yet to be ironed out. This has not been helped with the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan threatening to send buses of migrants over the borders. The deal is sweetened for Turkey with a renewed commitment to talk about possible EU accession, and visa-liberalisation for Turkish citizens into the Schengen Area.
Perhaps the last part of that deal would not prove so popular with many EU citizens. Elsewhere:
…Tsipras has upped the ante again: warning parliament in Athens that he will not allow Greece to become, “a warehouse of souls,” and announcing that if Greece is left alone to deal with the crisis, he would block EU decisions at the next leaders’ summit in Brussels.
The Open Europe post is a good look at how Europe is failing to solve its refugee problems, or even come close.
Do conservatives prefer to use nouns?
The researchers, led by Dr Aleksandra Cichocka of the School of Psychology, also established that conservatives generally, to a greater degree than liberals, tend to refer to things by their names, rather than describing them in terms of their features. An example would be saying someone ‘is an optimist’, rather than ‘is optimistic’.
This use of nouns, rather than adjectives, is seen to preserve stability, familiarity and tradition – all of which appear to be valued more highly by conservatives than liberals.
Because nouns ‘elicit clearer and more definite perceptions of reality than other parts of speech’, they satisfy the desire for ‘structure and certainty’ that is common among social conservatives, the research authors found.
The research was based on studies carried out in three countries – Poland, Lebanon, and the USA. The US study compared presidential speeches delivered by representatives of the two main political parties. The sample included 45 speeches delivered by Republicans, considered to be more conservative, and 56 speeches delivered by then Democrats, considered to be more liberal.
The (gated) paper is here, and for the pointer I thank Charles Klingman.
Churchill and His Money
That is the subtitle, the proper title of David Lough’s new book is No More Champagne. I had not known the extent of the story here, namely that Churchill had appalling standards for money management and exercised extremely poor judgment over most of his adult life. Here is one bit from the opening:
…Churchill had recently inherited his great-grandmother’s Irish estate, transforming the erstwhile entrepreneur into a propertied landlord for the first time in his life — a rentier, as his wife Clementine put it.
To her intense disappointment, Churchill consumed the entire inheritance within a decade — by underestimating the cost of converting his new country home at Chartwell, by gambling more than he ever let on and by losing heavily in the Wall Street Crash of 1929…
In fact Churchill resigned from the Conservative front bench in the 1930s so he could earn more money as a writer and to some extent make up for these losses; that was one reason why he developed such a vivid writing style. He ended up borrowing about $3.75 million in current dollars. And there is this:
…during the decade, he gambled heavily enough on his holidays to lose an average of £40,000 each year in today’s money.
I enjoyed this sentence from the book:
Churchill was conscious that as chancellor of the exchequer his financial habits would have to change.
And this:
After the war, when taxes on income reached an eye-watering 97.5 per cent, Churchill rarely considered any business proposition unless his advisers assured him that he could present it to the Inland Revenue as a capital receipt, which would escape tax, rather than as income.
During the war, Churchill in fact challenged tax rulings from Inland Revenue on his various filings, and typically the rulings were in his favor. Over time, Inland Revenue stopped bothering his claims and assessments. Churchill had ongoing skirmishes with the tax collectors for over forty years and, believe it or not, he won most of them.
Recommended, an interesting book. The topic of politicians with money problems could indeed use more study.
Christina and David Romer on the Sanders plan
They have produced a systematic critique of the overly optimistic projections (pdf):
…standard indicators of slack suggest that the output gap is currently no more than moderate. The unemployment rate, at 4.9%, is at normal levels. A broader measure of unemployment (the “U-6” measure) is just 2 percentage points above its low point before the 2008 recession. The Federal Reserve index of capacity utilization is about 4 percentage points below its pre-recession level. Job vacancies, which one would expect to be low with vast slack, are above their pre-recession levels. And inflation, which one would expect to fall in an economy operating far below capacity, is flat or perhaps creeping slightly upward. None of this is remotely consistent with a shortfall of output from capacity of even 10%, much less the amount that would be needed to accommodate Friedman’s estimate that the Sanders policies would raise output in 2026 37% above the CBO forecast.
There is much more at the link. For the pointer I thank many people in my Twitter feed, including Austan Goolsbee.
Jonathan Haidt seeks a hire
From an email, via Dan Klein:
We are seeking a talented and experienced researcher with some tech skills to help run two projects that use social science research to improve major American institutions. Your main job would be research director for HeterodoxAcademy.org, a collaboration of social scientists trying to increase viewpoint diversity in the academy. You would also be part of the team at EthicalSystems.org, a research collaboration that uses behavioral science to “make ethics easy” for businesses.
The ideal candidate will be a recent Ph.D. or ABD in the social sciences with both technological sophistication and excellent writing skills.
To Apply: Send a CV, writing sample, and cover letter explaining why you would be a good fit for the job to Jeremy Willinger, Communications Director, at [email protected].
China estimate of the day
Consider that China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported that China’s migrant population (defined as Chinese people that have left their hometown to seek employment or education elsewhere in the country) decreased by 5.7 million people in 2015. This was the first reported decrease in 30 years.
That is from the Bass letter outlining a bearish case on China, too bearish from my point of view. But still I am worried. On related matters, here is Christopher Balding on whether China in fact still has a trade surplus.
Thursday assorted links
1. The economic cost of gender gaps; “We find that gender gaps cause an average income loss of 15 percent in the OECD, 40 percent of which is due to entrepreneurship gaps.”
2. Our first “practice questions” video for MRU, on economic growth and the Rule of 70.
3. Wearable robot transforms musicians into three-armed drummers.
4. The global black market in cacti.
5. Does chocolate make you smarter? (speculative)
China fact of the day
With 32 newly minted super-rich in the past year, China’s capital has become the billionaire capital of the world, the latest Hurun Global Rich List says, with a total of 100 to the Big Apple’s 95.
And this:
China’s growing clout in the rankings is even starker in the world of female “self-made” billionaires, according to Hurun, where the country dominates with 93 of the global total of 124.
That is from Yuan Yang at the FT.
The economics of used book sales
Matt G. asks me:
Twice a year the San Francisco Public Library holds a book-sale benefit at which it resells a warehouse’s worth of used books that have been donated. They advertise that +500,000 items are available. Not matter freaking what, every hardcover is $3 and every paperback is $2. The books are loosely organized into “fiction,” “history,” “essay,” etc but beyond that totally unsorted.
I say the people who bought Pynchon tend to keep him, and the potential donations of the most popular authors are rejected by the library staff, on the grounds that they otherwise would be accepting too many copies and selling them at too low a price. I, too, have seen plenty of Herman Wouk at Virginia sales, what is up with that? Do they simply not know they ought to reject his titles?
The way to do well at those sales is to arrive with a knowledge of which editions and translations of the classics are the worthwhile ones. Otherwise, in this age of used copies available on Amazon, I don’t see why attending such sales should be worthwhile. They can be good for atlases and picture books. In the old days I used to scour used book sales for copies of Augustus Kelley editions of the economics history of thought classics, do they still turn up?
I have high hopes for Stripe Atlas
Stripe Atlas [is] a new product the company unveiled this week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It aims to make it easier for entrepreneurs to set up small businesses in the United States. If all goes according to Stripe’s plan, Atlas could let start-up founders sidestep some of the bureaucratic hurdles that often hamper building a new business.
Determining eligibility requires little more than filling out a form. After that, Stripe will incorporate an entrepreneur’s company as a business entity in Delaware, and provide the entrepreneur with a United States bank account and Stripe merchant account to accept payments globally.
The target audience is all of the entrepreneurs outside the United States who want access to the country’s well-developed banking infrastructure and business services. Stripe is particularly interested in attracting entrepreneurs from Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and parts of Asia, among other regions.
…Eligible entrepreneurs will also be offered access to basic tax and legal consulting and business services from partners like PricewaterhouseCoopers, and will receive free credit to run their online business on the Amazon Web Services hosting platform.
Atlas is to begin on Wednesday in an invitation-only beta test; entrepreneurs can apply for the program through Stripe or one of the 50-plus start-up accelerator programs that the company has teamed up with globally. The beta program’s cost is $500.
Here is the Mike Isaac NYT article.
What is the dollar value of U.S. citizenship?
Neil Munro writes to me with a question:
…[what is] the dollar value of U.S. citizenship, because of its financial, security, status and other benefits for an immigrant form China or India?
Do you know of people who have tried to calculate the value? Net-present value, I’d guess.
There is the famous paper by Michael Clemens, but I don’t think it calculates such a number straight up. How about the lead Sumption link here? Do any of you know the best answer?
How to fix the incentive structure of science
This is from David L. Stern, who is not the David Stern who was formerly commissioner of the NBA:
…I am won over by the arguments that science papers should be made available freely to everyone as soon as authors feel that the work is complete. Posting papers to preprint servers is one good solution; I imagine there are others. (I prefer to call such documents open papers to remove the stigma associated with calling the work “pre” anything.) However, the discussion about the future of open papers has been imbalanced, with too much emphasis on the consequences of open papers for peer review and too little discussion of the fact that scientists are driven to publish in journals because of the existing incentive structure. The CV, and, specifically, journal names (and impact factors, journal reputation, etc.) are used extensively to judge scientists in competitions for jobs, promotions, and grant money. This is the main impediment to widespread adoption of open papers. I have heard many arguments about how it is too hard to change the structure of these competitions and that we should, instead, focus on producing great science in open papers, and let the culture-shift follow. In contrast, I think it is easier to change the incentive structure first; widespread adoption of open-papers will follow, like water flowing downhill.
There are further suggestions at the link. Hat tip goes to Jeffrey Flier.